WTX (a workstation form factor) would have been another one, but it never really caught on AFAIK and its implementation is now discouraged according to the webpage:
"It is NOT recommend that NEW IA32 based workstations be designed to the WTX- form-factor."
formfactors.org doesn't even mention WTX in their formats summary.
Buying a system without a built-in audio subsystem (even if it's as bad as the crummy AC'97 codecs found on most mobos today) is getting more and more difficult and severely restricts your company's choices. Not a very smart move, if you ask me. Of course they can glue the PC's output jacks shut, but that doesn't exactly help in the resale value department either...
PC Audio is not really an option today, even in the business environment. Think CBT, for example.
Yes they are, follow this link for an example CD. The copy "protection" is key2audio (nice try, guys - took me all of 10 minutes to circumvent), and the text on the page says "Kopiergeschützte CD, nicht im CD-ROM-Laufwerk abspielbar!", which translates as "Copy protected CD, cannot be played in CD-ROM drives".
It's also a form of denial of service attack, at least it was in my case - a CDS200 protected CDconfused the Windows CDFS driver in my installation so thouroughly that it brought WinME to a screeching halt. (yeah, I know, that's what you get from using Windows, etc.)
Luckily, I didn't lose any important stuff, but I was quite upset as nothing on the disk said the CD would not work in a PC CDROM drive (well, if you use a magnifying glass there's a tiny "Midbar Technologies" copyright notice on the back of the CD, but how was I supposed to know that this means the CD is copy protected???)
Interesting thought: If your PC crashes because you used a copy protected CD which was not properly marked as such and you lose money because of this, you could sue the record company for damages, right? Now that would be fun, getting rich through copy protection, and at the expense of one of the major record labels to boot...
Here are the thoughts of security guru Bruce Schneier (of "Applied Cryptography" and "Secrets and Lies" fame) about national ID cards.
Definitely worth a read.
His conclusion:
"I am not saying that national IDs are completely ineffective, or that they are useless. That's not the question. But given the effectiveness and the costs, are IDs worth it? Hell, no."
Here are the thoughts of security guru Bruce Schneier (of "Applied Cryptography" and "Secrets and Lies" fame) about national ID cards.
Definitely worth a read.
His conclusion:
"I am not saying that national IDs are completely ineffective, or that they are useless. That's not the question. But given the effectiveness and the costs, are IDs worth it? Hell, no."
Yup, that's what happens if you use the original CD. Fortunately enough, all the so called "copy protection" schemes used by the recording industry aren't worth a penny (usenet is your friend...). Burn a de-CDSed copy to CD-R or RW and use this instead of the original to record to MD or rip to MP3/Ogg or whatever.
I have a minidisc recorder/player and I can connect audio in from any source, whether it be a 3.5 mm analog connection or an optical connection and record exactly what is being played.
Well, that's what I thought, too - until I bought the latest Nathalie Imbruglia CD. When I wanted to record it to MiniDisc, I was in for a nasty surprise - the TOC filled up with 3-second long fragments of music, and the display of my Sony MD unit ran berserk. Turns out this CD is "protected" using Cactus CDS200 here in Europe, although they certainly don't beat you over the head with it (the only indication is a Midbar Tech copyright notice in a tiny tiny font on the back cover). Doh.
Fortunately, CDS200 is ludicrously easy to circumvent (Usenet is your friend...), and with little effort you can make a perfect digital copy which can be recorded to MD, ripped to MP3 and played in your CD-ROM or DVD drive. Still, I resent the fact that I had to invest money (the cost of a blank CD-R) and time in order to exercise my rights as a legitimate buyer of a product. It would have been easier for me to get the tracks off p2p illegally, and as a bonus I would have had them before the actual release date of the CD in my country.
I beg to differ. First of all, finger-pointing at linux/open source incidents is inappropriate: nobody (at least nobody in their right mind) says that open source has no holes, but from my experience, security problems are spotted earlier, discussed openly and fixed immediately. All this in stark contrast to Microsoft's disgusting "security through obscurity" view of disclosure.
Your shifting the blame to "unqualified microsoft admins" (like, every Unix is qualified - right!) is quite telling. May I suggest the problem lies a bit closer to Redmond than you think?
Actually, digital rips in good quality were available on p2p for Heather Nova's and Natalie Imbruglia's recent copy protected albums before the albums were available in the stores over here. This copy protection stuff is just plain worthless and just p***** off the consumers, I wonder why the music industry bothers with it. Either they're absolutely clueless or just plain desperate - my guess would be both.
Here's what renowned cryptography guru Bruce Schneier has to say about the DMCA (emphasis mine):
---
[...] Dmitry Sklyarov (age 27) landed in jail because the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes publishing critical research on this technology a more serious offense than publishing nuclear weapon designs. Just how did the United States of America end up with a law protecting the entertainment industry at the expense of freedom of speech? And how did the entertainment industry end up with stronger laws protecting their content than the information on constructing nuclear weapons? [...]
Welcome to 21st century America, where the profits of the major record labels, movie houses, and publishing companies are more important than First Amendment rights or nuclear weapons information. (The more you look at the problem, the weirder it becomes. "The New York Times" has the legal right to publish secret government documents, unless they are protected by a digital copy-protection scheme, in which case publishing them would lead to an FBI raid.)
[...]
The entertainment industry is behaving the same way. The DMCA is unconstitutional, but they don't care. Until it's ruled unconstitutional, they've won. The charges against Sklyarov won't stick, but the chilling effect it will have on other researchers will. If they can scare software companies, ISPs, programmers, and T-shirt manufacturers (Hollywood has sued CopyLeft for publishing the DeCSS code on a T-shirt) into submission, they've won for another day. The entertainment industry is fighting a holding action, and fear, uncertainty, and doubt are their weapons. We need to win this, and we need to win it quickly. Please support those who are fighting these cases in the courts: the EFF and others. Every day we don't win is a loss.
If they tried to control mp3s more they'd be shooting themselves in the foot with another, better, codec trying to break through.
... except if mp3 is way past critical mass by the time they tighten the thumbscrews on the manufacturers and consumers (lots of hardware sold which supports mp3 only, for example). Then "another, better codec" will have a hard time displacing mp3.
So, why not go with "another, better codec" (Ogg) right now and feel good that nobody will be able to rip you off (pun intended), ever?
Fraunhofer: "Here, have an mp3. The first one's free."
I think you made some very good points here that I forgot to mention in my comment below (consistency, stocking multiple RAM types, longer lifecycle, stability).
BTW, the supplier from which I ordered the AMD evaluation system has published a corporate AMD processors roadmap for the first time, although it's still labeled "for projects only" - that is, they're still holding back with marketing but the systems are available for corporate customers upon request. Sorry I can't give you the name (NDA is rather strict), but asking your major suppliers will probably unearth similar roadmaps.
One disadvantage of the i815 platform, and about the only reason we see to switch to i845 is the 512 MB memory limitation, which is starting to rear its ugly head in some situations.
Oh, and the system which is going to replace my aging Deceleron box at home soon will be an AMD, no doubts about that. But that's a different story.
That comment intrigues me... do corporate customers still consider AMD-based platforms to be non-viable? What are your reasons for waiting for a 'viable' P4 platform? Why is the current P4 platform non-viable...is it just the price?
At my employer (large corp in Europe), we are still clinging to the P3 platform for now. Reasons:
Great choice and great prices on P3/i815 business systems with >= 256 MB SDRAM
P4, especially with RDRAM, is too expensive for the performance increase you get
we don't see the need for much more performance in the near future - where's the killer app gobbling up cycles like peanuts in the office environment? Spending more money just to have MS Worse (misspelling intended) wait a little faster for user input doesn't make economic sense. Of course we could be wrong here, but spending top dollar on first-tier hardware just on the possibility that such an app might come along doesn't look like a sensible business decision. Rather than that, we buy second- or even third-tier iron and upgrade when the need arises.
and, by the way, many current P4 and AMD systems are too loud. Most of our users won't notice a 20% performance increase, but they sure as hell notice their PC making a racket below their desks
as for AMD:
There are less offerings in the office PC segment from the big name manufacturers we deal with, although the situation has been getting better lately
The chipsets, well... one may disagree here, but here in businessland Intel is still number one in reputation, in spite of all their past mistakes. VIA & co. are still looked at with a little suspicion (can you say "4 in 1"?)
I actually had our main supplier make us an offer for an AMD-based alternative to our current 1GHz/i815 P3 box and received it just two days ago. Performance-wise, the AMD system likely runs rings around the PIII box (i haven't got the actual system yet), but it's also 9% more expensive than the latter for several reasons (faster processor, additional graphics card needed, DDR RAM, no onboard NIC available for this particular model). I know we're comparing apples to oranges here, but the situation being as it is, we can't justify the added expense and additional QA/deployment/maintenance cost to our management. nVidia TNT2 graphics instead of the lame i815 onboard graphics? Cool, but we run business apps here, not UT or Quake.
My guess is that AMDs future in the business environment depends as much on the chipset manufacturers as on itself. According to the head sales rep of one of our suppliers, there are also some strong regional differences in the way that AMD is seen as an alternative to Intel.
Wouldn't that actually be an improvement over cellphones playing Beethoven's Ninth performed by a piezo speaker at full blast? After all, if someone lets go a force ten pantsbuster in a crowded room, he's sure to have all heads turned to his direction.
Really, how bad is an attack by a script kid ? The worst they will do is to deface your site. In that case, you simply restore your backups, after fixing the flaw.
Since you'll probably have a hard time finding out when the system was first compromised, your system backup will possibly be useless. As for the data, it depends what kind of data we're talking about. An mp3-collection with most of the ID3-tags changed to "3l337 h4x0R 0\/\/Nz y00"? Probably not too bad. Thousands of lines of c++ code in charge of some heavy equipment or nuclear power plant? Very bad. Was it really a kiddie who compromised the system, or was it a top-notch pro just trying to fool you into thinking the break-in wasn't too serious? And remember, there is data which loses its value immediately after a possible leak to outsiders, even if it was encrypted.
>> Now we have a scientist from democratic Russia, [...]
Don't hold your breath. Looks like Putin is working hard at getting rid of the democratic in the above sentence. Taking control over the press and the TV [and radio?] stations doesn't really look like a democracy-enhancing move to me.
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Fat Chuck's has a list of "copy protected" CDs. Please contribute if you find a new one, thanks.
WTX (a workstation form factor) would have been another one, but it never really caught on AFAIK and its implementation is now discouraged according to the webpage:
"It is NOT recommend that NEW IA32 based workstations be designed to the WTX- form-factor."
formfactors.org doesn't even mention WTX in their formats summary.
Good one, thanks.
:P
I also predict that they will also achieve an impressive compression rate on their venture capital
Buying a system without a built-in audio subsystem (even if it's as bad as the crummy AC'97 codecs found on most mobos today) is getting more and more difficult and severely restricts your company's choices. Not a very smart move, if you ask me. Of course they can glue the PC's output jacks shut, but that doesn't exactly help in the resale value department either...
PC Audio is not really an option today, even in the business environment. Think CBT, for example.
Yup.
MIPS = Meaningless Indicator of Processor Speed.
Yes they are, follow this link for an example CD. The copy "protection" is key2audio (nice try, guys - took me all of 10 minutes to circumvent), and the text on the page says "Kopiergeschützte CD, nicht im CD-ROM-Laufwerk abspielbar!", which translates as "Copy protected CD, cannot be played in CD-ROM drives".
Doh.
Raymond
It's also a form of denial of service attack, at least it was in my case - a CDS200 protected CDconfused the Windows CDFS driver in my installation so thouroughly that it brought WinME to a screeching halt. (yeah, I know, that's what you get from using Windows, etc.)
Luckily, I didn't lose any important stuff, but I was quite upset as nothing on the disk said the CD would not work in a PC CDROM drive (well, if you use a magnifying glass there's a tiny "Midbar Technologies" copyright notice on the back of the CD, but how was I supposed to know that this means the CD is copy protected???)
Interesting thought: If your PC crashes because you used a copy protected CD which was not properly marked as such and you lose money because of this, you could sue the record company for damages, right? Now that would be fun, getting rich through copy protection, and at the expense of one of the major record labels to boot...
Raymond
Damn... posted the comment above to the wrong article, sorry. Moderators, feel free to mod it offtopic.
Raymond
Here are the thoughts of security guru Bruce Schneier (of "Applied Cryptography" and "Secrets and Lies" fame) about national ID cards.
Definitely worth a read.
His conclusion:
"I am not saying that national IDs are completely ineffective, or that they are useless. That's not the question. But given the effectiveness and the costs, are IDs worth it? Hell, no."
Raymond
Here are the thoughts of security guru Bruce Schneier (of "Applied Cryptography" and "Secrets and Lies" fame) about national ID cards.
Definitely worth a read.
His conclusion:
"I am not saying that national IDs are completely ineffective, or that they are useless. That's not the question. But given the effectiveness and the costs, are IDs worth it? Hell, no."
Raymond
US$ 149.99 estimated street price, according to this page
Raymond
Yup, that's what happens if you use the original CD. Fortunately enough, all the so called "copy protection" schemes used by the recording industry aren't worth a penny (usenet is your friend...). Burn a de-CDSed copy to CD-R or RW and use this instead of the original to record to MD or rip to MP3/Ogg or whatever.
Raymond
I have a minidisc recorder/player and I can connect audio in from any source, whether it be a 3.5 mm analog connection or an optical connection and record exactly what is being played.
Well, that's what I thought, too - until I bought the latest Nathalie Imbruglia CD. When I wanted to record it to MiniDisc, I was in for a nasty surprise - the TOC filled up with 3-second long fragments of music, and the display of my Sony MD unit ran berserk. Turns out this CD is "protected" using Cactus CDS200 here in Europe, although they certainly don't beat you over the head with it (the only indication is a Midbar Tech copyright notice in a tiny tiny font on the back cover). Doh.
Fortunately, CDS200 is ludicrously easy to circumvent (Usenet is your friend...), and with little effort you can make a perfect digital copy which can be recorded to MD, ripped to MP3 and played in your CD-ROM or DVD drive. Still, I resent the fact that I had to invest money (the cost of a blank CD-R) and time in order to exercise my rights as a legitimate buyer of a product. It would have been easier for me to get the tracks off p2p illegally, and as a bonus I would have had them before the actual release date of the CD in my country.
Raymond
yeah, but can they play tetris on it????
Yup.
Raymond
I beg to differ. First of all, finger-pointing at linux/open source incidents is inappropriate: nobody (at least nobody in their right mind) says that open source has no holes, but from my experience, security problems are spotted earlier, discussed openly and fixed immediately. All this in stark contrast to Microsoft's disgusting "security through obscurity" view of disclosure.
Your shifting the blame to "unqualified microsoft admins" (like, every Unix is qualified - right!) is quite telling. May I suggest the problem lies a bit closer to Redmond than you think?
Raymond
I give it a month before someone cracks it.
Actually, digital rips in good quality were available on p2p for Heather Nova's and Natalie Imbruglia's recent copy protected albums before the albums were available in the stores over here. This copy protection stuff is just plain worthless and just p***** off the consumers, I wonder why the music industry bothers with it. Either they're absolutely clueless or just plain desperate - my guess would be both.
Raymond
A Java version of the Infocom HHG is available here (douglasadams.com):
. html
http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava
Save and restore don't work in this version, though.
Raymond
Here's what renowned cryptography guru Bruce Schneier has to say about the DMCA (emphasis mine):
---
[...] Dmitry Sklyarov (age 27) landed in jail because the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes publishing critical research on this technology a more serious offense than publishing nuclear weapon designs. Just how did the United States of America end up with a law protecting the entertainment industry at the expense of freedom of speech? And how did the entertainment industry end up with stronger laws protecting their content than the information on constructing nuclear weapons?
[...]
Welcome to 21st century America, where the profits of the major record labels, movie houses, and publishing companies are more important than First Amendment rights or nuclear weapons information. (The more you look at the problem, the weirder it becomes. "The New York Times" has the legal right to publish secret government documents, unless they are protected by a digital copy-protection scheme, in which case publishing them would lead to an FBI raid.)
[...]
The entertainment industry is behaving the same way. The DMCA is unconstitutional, but they don't care. Until it's ruled unconstitutional, they've won. The charges against Sklyarov won't stick, but the chilling effect it will have on other researchers will. If they can scare software companies, ISPs, programmers, and T-shirt manufacturers (Hollywood has sued CopyLeft for publishing the DeCSS code on a T-shirt) into submission, they've won for another day. The entertainment industry is fighting a holding action, and fear, uncertainty, and doubt are their weapons. We need to win this, and we need to win it quickly. Please support those who are fighting these cases in the courts: the EFF and others. Every day we don't win is a loss.
---
Read the full text here.
Raymond
Cognitoy actually did this for their Mindrover robot sim, see this link.
So, why not go with "another, better codec" (Ogg) right now and feel good that nobody will be able to rip you off (pun intended), ever?
Fraunhofer: "Here, have an mp3. The first one's free."
Raymond
BTW, the supplier from which I ordered the AMD evaluation system has published a corporate AMD processors roadmap for the first time, although it's still labeled "for projects only" - that is, they're still holding back with marketing but the systems are available for corporate customers upon request. Sorry I can't give you the name (NDA is rather strict), but asking your major suppliers will probably unearth similar roadmaps.
One disadvantage of the i815 platform, and about the only reason we see to switch to i845 is the 512 MB memory limitation, which is starting to rear its ugly head in some situations.
Oh, and the system which is going to replace my aging Deceleron box at home soon will be an AMD, no doubts about that. But that's a different story.
At my employer (large corp in Europe), we are still clinging to the P3 platform for now. Reasons:
Great choice and great prices on P3/i815 business systems with >= 256 MB SDRAM
P4, especially with RDRAM, is too expensive for the performance increase you get
we don't see the need for much more performance in the near future - where's the killer app gobbling up cycles like peanuts in the office environment? Spending more money just to have MS Worse (misspelling intended) wait a little faster for user input doesn't make economic sense.
Of course we could be wrong here, but spending top dollar on first-tier hardware just on the possibility that such an app might come along doesn't look like a sensible business decision. Rather than that, we buy second- or even third-tier iron and upgrade when the need arises.
and, by the way, many current P4 and AMD systems are too loud. Most of our users won't notice a 20% performance increase, but they sure as hell notice their PC making a racket below their desks
as for AMD:
There are less offerings in the office PC segment from the big name manufacturers we deal with, although the situation has been getting better lately
The chipsets, well... one may disagree here, but here in businessland Intel is still number one in reputation, in spite of all their past mistakes. VIA & co. are still looked at with a little suspicion (can you say "4 in 1"?)
I actually had our main supplier make us an offer for an AMD-based alternative to our current 1GHz/i815 P3 box and received it just two days ago. Performance-wise, the AMD system likely runs rings around the PIII box (i haven't got the actual system yet), but it's also 9% more expensive than the latter for several reasons (faster processor, additional graphics card needed, DDR RAM, no onboard NIC available for this particular model). I know we're comparing apples to oranges here, but the situation being as it is, we can't justify the added expense and additional QA/deployment/maintenance cost to our management. nVidia TNT2 graphics instead of the lame i815 onboard graphics? Cool, but we run business apps here, not UT or Quake.
My guess is that AMDs future in the business environment depends as much on the chipset manufacturers as on itself. According to the head sales rep of one of our suppliers, there are also some strong regional differences in the way that AMD is seen as an alternative to Intel.
Raymond
Wouldn't that actually be an improvement over cellphones playing Beethoven's Ninth performed by a piezo speaker at full blast? After all, if someone lets go a force ten pantsbuster in a crowded room, he's sure to have all heads turned to his direction.
Since you'll probably have a hard time finding out when the system was first compromised, your system backup will possibly be useless. As for the data, it depends what kind of data we're talking about. An mp3-collection with most of the ID3-tags changed to "3l337 h4x0R 0\/\/Nz y00"? Probably not too bad. Thousands of lines of c++ code in charge of some heavy equipment or nuclear power plant? Very bad. Was it really a kiddie who compromised the system, or was it a top-notch pro just trying to fool you into thinking the break-in wasn't too serious? And remember, there is data which loses its value immediately after a possible leak to outsiders, even if it was encrypted.
$.02,
Raymond
Don't hold your breath. Looks like Putin is working hard at getting rid of the democratic in the above sentence. Taking control over the press and the TV [and radio?] stations doesn't really look like a democracy-enhancing move to me.